ARM to Remain Independent – Company.

ARM, the developer of microprocessing technologies for ultra low power devices, believes that it will remain independent despite of the interest towards the company by large customers, such as Apple.

"If you get a buyer who is a significant part of the ecosystem, in which they already play a part, it is likely that they would be excluding part of the market and therefore diminishing part of the value of ARM. ARM has been built around the principle of being agnostic at every point in the value chain. Because of that approach, it means that acquisitions are very difficult. It's not impossible, but ARM is a very valuable business as it is and a significant part of that value lies in its agnostic approach," said Warren East, chief executive officer of ARM, in an interview with The Telegraph.

According to Mr. East, customers of ARM simply do not need to buy the company as they have access to the technology without owning ARM. Moreover, ARM hardly needs to be bought as the amount of its customers allows to continue development of technologies for central processing units (CPUs).

"If you look at the end customer, like an Apple, or any company within the ecosystem at any particular point in the value chain, if one of those companies were to acquire ARM – well, why? They either want access to the technology, which they have already, or they want to prevent competitors from gaining access to it. In reality it doesn't work very well... If you want to prevent your competitors getting the technology, it's not a very good way of doing it. There are 800 licensees out there. Most are perpetual licenses. They last forever. The worst that company could do is seriously inconvenience their competitors,” said Mr. East.

The head of ARM also does not believe that the company may be bought by other chip designers, in particular Intel Corp., due to potential issues with anti-trust organizations.

Discussion

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An acquisition would obviously be intended to restrict access to ARM technology, but that would probably only make other low powered designs look more appealing, and there are a lot of other low power chip designs, both RISC and x86.

The scenario I`d like to see would be AMD and ARM merging. These two companies would have a lot of synergies to build upon. AMD could learn how to further improve on their power conseravation, and ARM could gain access to the APU architecture and integrate GPU circuitry into their designs to give certain versions of their chips dramatically more FPU performance, in, say blade servers with low power requirements.

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@anubis44

Ya, I too think it would be the perfect marriage; they would mutually perfectly benefit each other. AMD and ARM would get more market and better products. The synergies are at least quadruple. It in fact, it's the only suitable merger for AMD or ARM. ARM says its comfortable, but there is no denying that access to AMD technology would elevate their business - profit - and vice versa.

That being said, both companies are very well organized and a physical merge would not be necessary. A deal similar to Nvidia and Intel should be made, but between AMD and ARM to have access to each others technology. CEO approved, lol!